Yandex Introduces Sona: A Single Generative Recommender That Replaces Entire Recommendation Cascade

What happened

Yandex tested the model in a seven-day live production experiment on its smart speakers. One transformer ran candidate generation and ranking in Yandex Music's A/B test without hand-engineered features, lifting likes 11.42%.

Candidate generators feed a pre-ranker, which feeds a heavy ranker built on hundreds of engineered features. Yandex’s Sona Technical Report describes a different design.

Sona is a generative AI model that brings candidate generation and ranking into a single system, replacing the multiple stages typically used in recommendation pipelines. In an online A/B test, it replaced more than 15 candidate generators, the pre-ranking stage, and the ranking stage with one served transformer.

Key facts

• Yandex — tested: the model in a seven-day live production experiment on its smart speakers